


The Castle Where Eternity Dwells

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: The Castle Where Eternity Dwells [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Attempted Murder, Gen, Horror, Murder, Self-Insert, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Rivalry, Tragedy, Unreliable Narrator, Violence, hints of incest if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-19 00:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15497811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Elizabeth Riddle knows too much about things that prove to be both out of time and mostly useless as her twin brother searches for the castle where eternity dwells and the revolution which must open its doors.





	1. Chapter 1

There’s a song that hasn’t been written about a boy named Sue.

It has a rugged, rough, twanging sound that you don’t hear in songs today. Like jazz but without the brass and the coolness, in the clear voice of every man, of any man. In it is the sound of wheat, the country, the casual violence of the common man’s life.

It’s amazing the things you know and the things you don’t. There are so many things that I can’t fit inside my head but I know that sound and I know those lyrics and every once in a while a catch myself humming along to a tune that Mr. Cash has yet to write.

_“My daddy left home when I was three_

_And he didn’t leave much to ma and me_

_Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze_

_Now, I don’t blame him cause he run and hid_

_But the meanest thing that he ever did_

_Was before he left, he went and named me ‘Sue’”_

I was almost a girl named Tom.

It wasn’t my father, my father has been absent since the day of my conception, and my mother took the more permanent exit of death through childbirth than simply leaving but it’s close enough to make a ballad out of it.

It’s amazing what you remember and what you don’t and what you should and what you shouldn’t.

I remember everything, but it was like watching a play for the first couple of years. I was me, standing outside of myself, and that crawling helpless thing was Elizabeth Mary Riddle.

(I’m getting ahead of myself, I promised myself I wouldn’t do that.)

I need to go back, to that girl named Tom.

Merope Guant walked into Wool’s orphanage in the cold December of 1926 too weak with childbirth and despair to go any further. She collapsed on their doorstep and was taken in and there was debate over seeing a medic but her water had already broken and she was deep into labor. So a younger Mrs. Cole told an assistant to go fetch water and “hurry it up the woman looks like she’s going to die right here on the floor”, and there was much talking of pushing, and staying strong.

Eventually, almost near midnight, I came out.

Only, like I said, it was like I was watching me at the time. I felt the terrible cold, the noise, the color, and the light but I was able to step back from myself as if it was some surreal dream. It was me, I knew it was me, but it didn’t matter.

David Lynch doesn’t exist yet either and neither do the films and television shows he directed but those early periods of my life (and the majority of my dreams themselves) are like a scene from a David Lynch dream. Everything is separated from reality, kept apart, and you walk through distantly knowing that it isn’t real but going along with it anyway. You make assumptions, like you’re in the audience and told that this man is named Hamlet and he’s going to die, and based on those assumptions you move forward and you don’t question them. Even when you know they’re wrong.

So I was the baby and I wasn’t the baby and I decided to accept that because that’s how the dream called life was going at that particular moment.

There was a towel wiping me, wiping off bodily fluids, and I fussed and cried in Mrs. Cole’s arms.

“It’s a girl.” Mrs. Cole said, looking relieved that I’d made it out okay or perhaps that I looked like a healthy normal baby unlike my pale, sickly, and uncomely mother.

“I…” Merope said, her eyes glassy, she was still pushing though not quite done and she tried to speak through the pain and the tears, “I…”

“Mrs. Cole, I think she’s having twins.” The girl assisting Mrs. Cole said, her eyes alarmed, still urging Merope to push now and then so that the other baby could join me in the land of the living.

“I… I want you to name him Tom… Like his father.” Merope bit out, before letting loose a cry causing the women to soothe her, “And… And his middle name… Marvolo… for my father.”

She started again, letting out a cry, the other baby was becoming visible but Merope didn’t even seem to notice even as Mrs. Cole and her assistant told her to push, push, and keep on pushing. For a while she didn’t speak, only screamed, as my sibling entered this world alongside me. I could only watch with blurred vision that refused to focus and somehow knew in spite of this that Merope was almost glittering with the sweat.

Only when the other baby was out, when it seemed as if she was done for the night, did she smile and say, “Tom Marvolo Riddle.”

And then only a few moments later, before Mrs. Cole got a chance to interject and insist that the first (the one she’d named) was a girl, and that there was a boy who’d needed naming too she died, right there on the floor in the mess of her own afterbirth.

Maybe my mother had known the second twin was a boy, but somehow I think that if I was the only one in there, then she’d still have insisted. At any rate there were two of us and my brother took the name Tom Marvolo Riddle and I wasn’t given any at all by my mother but instead was labeled Elizabeth Mary Riddle by Mrs. Cole.

So you see, I was almost a girl named Tom.

I think it’s this ‘almost’ business that gets me, that really gets at the heart of what I am and what’s wrong with me, because I’m almost that girl named Tom. I think the almost is why I’m a little different than everyone else, a little different even than my brother, who is in turn even more different than me.

Tom and Almost-Tom, that’s what we are.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

I want to talk about memory.

There’s a few different kinds of memories. There’s the things you remember about yourself, like a day at a park, or a specific incident. There’s the things you remember out of repetition, like you always liked ice cream and hated cats. And then there’s the things you just know but don’t remember how you learned it or where it really came from.

I have memories of a lot of things, useless small things, a lot of songs by Mr. Johnny Cash, the Na-Na-Na’s of “Hey Jude”, the life times and death of Jean Valjean, the name of Harry Callahan’s gun in “Dirty Harry”, and so many more.

I knew English before I heard a word of it and a neat American accent came with it (I never would manage to master the British), I’d always known how to read and write, and ask me what a computer program is and how to make it print out “Hello World” then I could have it done before you could blink.

I know things but I don’t know how or why. It’s just always been there, along with awareness, most people forget those first years and maybe even get hazy on the first ten but I’ve always remembered them and known them.

For the first few years the body was just this thing that I had to keep track of and when it got too cold, hungry, tired, etc. I just raised the alarm and waited for someone to come and take care of it. This probably kept me sane, because I can’t imagine what it would be like to actually be trapped in a toddler’s body.

For a while I assumed everyone was like this, that they had all this stuff that wasn’t real yet rolling around in their heads, and that you just kind of ignored it unless it was relevant. I thought everyone knew that the “Lion King” was really just “Hamlet” the musical but with more action and lions to go with it. It took a decent while for me to realize that I wasn’t normal, about the time that my American accent started to surface along with an impressive built in vocabulary.

This is just a fact to accept about me, your narrator, as we go along on our journey. I don’t know the why or the how, if there was a me before me and if that me died somehow, if I’m the least melodramatic and one of the most powerful seers to have ever existed, but it’s just something you have to roll with while I tell you a story.

The story of how I ended up telling this story to you now and everything that goes with it.

Another fact is that this story doesn’t start where I started it and it won’t end where I end it. Stories are like that, they’re like stations on a railway, you get on at one and you get off at another but you’re not at the end of the line either way, the story steams ahead without you leaving all possibilities to be discovered in its future. A good story never really ends, it haunts, it lingers, and that’s just how it is.

December 31, 1926 in Wool’s Orphanage in London.

Our first stop.

* * *

Seven year old Tom Riddle had a rabbit swinging in his hands and was eying the rafters with speculation. 

Tom and his sister had always been different, special, even if Mrs. Cole and everyone else tried to deny it.

Lizzie said not to say things like that, she always got this weird look on her face when he brought it up (because it was true and she knew it), and said that it was bad to look down on others just because they weren’t like them; like they were supposed to want to be like Billy Stubbs or Amy or any of the other orphans.

He never knew why Lizzie was so insistent about it especially since Tom knew that she knew that he was right.

Maybe it was because she was so bored in school. She knew everything they taught before they taught it, had taught Tom reading, writing, and mathematics long before they even attended. He remembered their first day, when it was clear that both he and Lizzie knew everything he was teaching, he’d just kind of looked at them and told them to keep doing everything the class was doing anyways. Sometimes he’d let Lizzie read her thick books that she managed to get from the library but only after she’d done all the worksheets for the day.

Tom was bored in class, being the second best student, he had no idea how bored Lizzie must be by all of it.

But that wasn’t really it though, it was too petty, shallow, something anyone might guess. Lizzie was comprised of layers, you peeled back one and there was always a thought beneath it, until you could go deeper and deeper without ever seeing the heart of her.

Tom had once overheard a conversation between their teacher and Mrs. Cole. It’d been in their first year of schooling, when Tom had thought there was some point to it, and hadn’t realized that Lizzie already knew and had told him everything. He’d been coming in from the yard having gotten bored of watching Lizzie stare quietly out at the other children, not in the mood for talking, and had been making his way to the classroom.

It was on the way that he heard voices coming from a room, the door slightly ajar, and inside was Mrs. Cole and their teacher.

The school was for the orphans, so it was small, and they didn’t have many resources but it meant that Mrs. Cole was kept well informed of things even if most of the time she didn’t really care.

Lizzie said, when she was too tired and unhappy to pretend to play nice, that Mrs. Cole kept a closer eye on the gin in her desk drawer than she did on any of them.

“Riddle, the girl or the boy?”  Their teacher had asked, Mrs. Cole must have asked about one of them, Tom stopped in the hallway and snuck closer to the door.

“Either, both.” Mrs. Cole said shortly sounding a little frustrated and impatient.

There was a sigh from their teacher as if he’d prefer just to talk about one, “Well, they’re both very smart, too smart. The girl at any rate is, not that the boy isn’t but… Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

There was a short laugh from Mrs. Cole, “Did you like the Yankee accent she’s got? Moment she started talking sounded like that and haven’t managed to get it out of her.”

“Yes, there’s that…” The teacher said, and Tom was almost holding breath, wondering if he was going to say how Tom and Lizzie were so far ahead, how Lizzie had started telling him things about ‘multiplication’ and ‘division’ and ‘fractions’ when they were still talking about numbers and adding in class.

He didn’t though, instead the two adults said nothing for a while, leaving Tom to stand outside there and wonder if they were ever going to say anything else. Eventually Mrs. Cole talked again.

“They’ve always been odd children; the girl and the boy. Never get into any mischief or anything like that but they’ve always been a bit alarming if you know what I mean. The boy’s too quiet, too composed, like a little businessman and the girl… Well, she looks through to your soul, doesn’t she?”

Later Mrs. Cole would replace odd with devil-child, when accidents started happening to the other orphans, when they wouldn’t shut up and learn their place. Back then though, they were just odd, different, disconcerting.

There was some noise of agreement from their teacher and nothing else. Finally he said, “The other children are doing well, learning to read and write, little Amy’s making fine progress…”

And after that they didn’t say anything more about Tom and Lizzie.

He told Lizzie about it later, in their room that night, and she’d laughed so hard that she shook the bedframe.

“Too intelligent.” She repeated in that drawling accent he’d never managed to imitate, that was so different from his own clipped version of English. He’d always liked the sound of it, that slow casual tone she always took that could somehow be blunt and brusque even while it wandered, “I like that, very polite.”

He’d blinked at her, not quite understanding just like he hadn’t quite understood when their teacher had said it, because being intelligent was a good thing. He’d known that the teacher had been hesitant to say it, had meant it as something else, but those words should have been a compliment.

Seeing his expression she’d explained with a bitter smile, “Too, Tom, it’s the word too. He should have used ‘very’, ‘too’ means that it’s in excess, like we’ve crossed some uncrossable line.”

Too, he didn’t quite get it then, but a few years later and the irony of it sunk in. He and his sister were always too much of something, for normal people anyway, they were too far beyond the rest of them and that made them scared. It was why all the orphans hated them, even Lizzie who said not to look and to just ignore them and wait for them to go away.

“They’re children, Tom, they’ll grow up and realize they have better things to do than to torment other children. Besides, it doesn’t really mean anything.” Lizzie would say after she’d find her school book ripped to shreds, all of her assignments and stories torn out and ruined, but her eyes would say more than she ever would.

Her shoulders would hunch over her possessions and when he wasn’t looking she’d hold them too close, and she’d squeeze her eyes shut, and it would look like she was fighting back tears. He’d never seen Lizzie cry, only about to cry, and every time she looked close he felt like someone was stabbing him in the chest.

Tom hated church, he used to just dislike it, but now he hated it. If anyone asked him he’d have a few reasons.

One was that he’d realized that God didn’t exist, God was a fairytale for people who were too scared to think about dying. If there was a God then there wouldn’t be orphans, he and Lizzie wouldn’t be trapped with stupid Billy Stubbs and crying Amy Bishop. But they were so there couldn’t be a God.

So he’d stand and kneel and stand and kneel and sing hymns thinking that it was so stupid because no one up there was listening. They were singing to a ceiling and it didn’t even bother to care.

The other, the main reason, was that he hated the idea of Jesus. Jesus Christ, better than everyone else, the best human there ever was, for three years roamed around the countryside performing miracles, and when he’d done that they tortured and nailed him to a cross and he still forgave them because they’re too stupid to do any better. He just sat there and took it and pretends it was all okay when it wasn’t, when it couldn’t be.

Sometimes, when he saw Lizzie with her ruined books, when he saw the other girls staring at her and giggling to each other like they know some dirty secret, she reminded him of Jesus nailed up on that cross and taking it.

But Tom wasn’t going to let her take it, even if she thought that was what was best, because Lizzie might know everything in the world but there were some things she’d never managed to get. Billy, Amy, Dennis, the whole lot of them would never change, they’d always be dirty, stupid, ungrateful, mean, orphans and they’d never be punished like they should.

There was no divine justice.

The rabbit was twitching frightfully in his hand, desperately trying to hop elsewhere with its useless legs. Looking in its eye, at its constantly moving nose, at the way it jerked, Tom couldn’t help but think that Billy should learn how to look like that himself. Just like that, that same paralyzed fear, erratic twitching of the limbs, knowing it was the end but trying to run just the same.

It probably had some name, snowball, fluffy, whatever it was Tom hadn’t been paying attention he’d just known that he’d finally had the opportunity to teach Billy Stubbs his place. To let them all know their place.

Something snapped, the rage inside him, the rabbit’s neck, and it was dangling limply in his hands as if it wasn’t anything more than a rag doll. Then concentrating hard, pulling deep within himself, he watched as the rabbit lifted into the air as if hung from an invisible noose, its eyes watching all who passed.

And Tom just grinned wildly beneath it, because surely this was a sign, he and his sister were intended for greater things than this.


	2. Chapter 2

There once was a girl who dreamed for a thousand years.

She fell asleep one day and even when the prince climbed the tower to kiss her she didn’t wake up…

I must be feeling nostalgic, but that’s all memoirs really are, nostalgia or perhaps even regret. A window to look back at the world, to see yourself through a strange warped glass that is your own self-reflection, and I’m never sure what to make of it.

Tom always loved stories, probably for as long as he can remember, even before he could talk he loved stories.

Tom is secretly a romantic. Well, perhaps that’s the wrong word, I don’t mean in the sense that a man loves a woman or well… Not in the sense of love, but in the way he builds things up inside his mind. He likes the idea of grandeur, of being somehow more than what you seem and the places you’ve been. Everything gains significance, places gain memories, so that it becomes more meaningful if something happens at Hogwarts, Stonehenge, the Ministry, Westminster, than it does anywhere else.

But Tom is also a realist and every so often he comes to terms with the fact that we have no father, our mother died in childbirth, and we grew up penniless in an orphanage where it might be considered a mild nuisance if one of us died of a fever in the middle of the night. But this is only every once in a while, in intervals, the rest of the time he spends spinning greater and more elaborate fantasies of his place in the world.

I don’t remember the first story I told Tom only that we were very young.

I was talking, Tom wasn’t quite yet, and the wind was howling outside the windows and against the window pane the branches looked like brittle fingers. He held onto me, not crying because even then Tom never liked to cry, and I just talked. Saying something, anything, so that he’d fall asleep and only I’d be staring out into the cold dark night.

I know many stories, too many maybe, Shakespeare said there were only seven stories but I seem to have countless inside my head. Sometimes I think, that if I had been Scheherazade, that maybe I could have lasted even more than one thousand and one nights because surely the nights I told stories to Tom were more than one thousand.

I started with tales featuring princesses, witches, kings, dragons, fairy stories that were filled with adventure but as Tom got older he became disillusioned with the idea of the gallant knight.

“Knights aren’t real, Lizzie.” He said one night with an expression that said he’d caught on to my tricks. “There’s no knights in real life."

And so I told him more complicated stories, moving on from children’s films that hadn’t been made to older ones, to the original Hans Christian Anderson tales where the Little Mermaid dies of despair in place of the prince who never realized who she was, the Little Matchstick Girl leaves reality and her frozen body behind, and eventually to stories that adults told each other.

Of gunslingers grown old and weary of bloodshed and terror but who continue fighting regardless, of chosen ones who aren’t certain why they’ve been chosen or what being chosen even amounts to, of political struggles where it’s not entirely clear which path is the correct path.

Perhaps then I’m to blame for some of what’s happened. I told many wondrous tales, I inadvertently misled him, fed his belief that we were something more than what we are…

Perhaps I’m the one who locked myself in the tower without even realizing there had been a door at all.

At any rate Tom believes the stories more than he will ever let anyone know. No matter what he says, screams, or even thinks to himself Tom does believe in chivalrous knights, wise kings, ancient dragons, and maidens in towers.

And if these don’t exist, if he is wrong, then he will make them exist.

Tom believes he has the ability to transcend reality itself through will alone and sometimes, when you look at him, you can’t help but believe it too…

But this isn’t the story I promised to tell, is it?

I left off with the death of our mother, Merope Gaunt, December 31st 1926.

For a while I would only know the minimal facts about her and at the end of things I think this is all that Tom or I really needed to know.

Later Tom would dig deeper into our family history than he should have and would discover the whole narrative; that one story that neither of us really needed to hear.

That our mother was a rapist who was beaten by our grandfather and uncle, that she had drugged her elitist muggle neighbor and eventually had become pregnant, that she had been driven out of her house when she’d stopped drugging him and had returned home with twins in her stomach, that she’d wandered the cold streets of London selling off priceless family heirlooms for prices that were much too low…

… There’s no reason to tell it. She is dead, our father might as well have been dead, and now he is dead. I find little reason to dwell on it, but I know that it consumes Tom, he stored this knowledge somewhere deep in the corners of his heart. Yes, Tom thinks about it far more than he should.  

Right, the story, back to the story.

Up until December, 1938, I’d thought that we were in the X-Men comics.

Well, not the X-Men comics exactly, a prologue to the X-Men, before many of the characters were even born maybe even before Professor X and Magneto themselves had been born. Or, if not a prologue, then a world like it. I don’t actually know that much about the X-Men if I’m being honest but still it’d seemed to fit until…

When I realized it was Harry Potter and that Tom and I were wizards, not mutants, I couldn’t help but feel a little stupid.

But never the less, until we’d turned eleven years old, it had been my best guess.

Because it was true that Tom and I weren’t like other children. I was… I was me, which I’ve already explained, and Tom had his fair share of peculiarities as well.

He was very smart, maybe it was overshadowed by my own unnaturally adult intelligence, but he’s always been very clever. More than that Tom wanted to learn, he wanted to know everything that I knew and more, always pushing to go faster, to walk sooner, to do everything that was possible.

That’s not unheard of though, that’s not what made me question the world I lived in.

Throughout our childhood mysterious accidents would occur to the other children. No one would be around, no one would push them, there’d be nothing for them to trip over, but suddenly they would fall down the stairs or trip over their own feet only knowing that they had offended Tom the day before and that no one would believe them if they blamed him.

People also had a tendency to listen to Tom too easily, if he said go away, they went, if he told them to jump, they asked how high with a dazed and slightly confused expression.

Probability is a funny and sometimes damning thing. The trouble is, if a thing occurs more often than you would expect randomly, then sometimes you can’t help but realize that perhaps it isn’t as random as you thought. That Tom really was controlling these mysterious accidents.

And when Tom lynched Billy Stubb’s bunny I felt like I’d known for years…

So I couldn’t help but think, that morning when I grabbed Tom and dragged him back into our bedroom, when I tried to come up with the words that would make him understand that you can’t do these things, that only serial killers killed animals for fun, I couldn’t help but think that maybe Tom and I weren’t that human after all.

Mutants, it’s harsher than wizards and witches. That was really the crux of the comics from what I remember, that word mutant, as if we were somehow deformed and perhaps even inhuman. I never used that word with Tom, with me, not even then.

I don’t know what I want to say about this.

I did try to tell him, but sometimes Tom and I don’t understand one another, because Tom just looked at me as if I was the one who didn’t understand some eternal truth. He held my hand and shook his head, a small sad smile on his lips, “It’s okay, Lizzie, you just don’t get it yet. But you will, because even Jesus could have gotten it if someone had done a better job of explaining.”

I thought what I’d say might offend him, might frighten him that I knew, but it didn’t. He just took it in stride, for four years he’d take it in stride, and with each incident he’d grow more insistent that he was right and I was wrong.

He also became a little more eloquent with his arguments, every night after something new had occurred, we’d stay up late into the night and his latest act of violence would stand trial between us. After a while it stopped even bothering me, it just became an intellectual activity, actually kind of refreshing as I got so few chances to really think beyond reading.

And whenever I thought about it, after Tom had fallen asleep, I would always hate myself a little for it.

“You know they’re not like us, Lizzie.” An eight year old Tom explained with a lazy, pleased smile, after Dennis had sprained an ankle. It was on the more violent side for Tom, the children had learned to stay away from Tom early on, and now only the truly brave or truly stupid persisted in bothering. For the most part he stole dolls, toys, if someone looked at him funny or said something he didn’t like.

He made Wool’s Orphanage into his own little fiefdom and he ran it fiercely.

Tom felt this, the difference between us and them, supported his actions all the more. Once going on to say that it was Darwin in action, because one day their stupidity and obstinacy was going to get them killed and taken out of the evolutionary pool.

We were both small children, but somehow with the shadows over his face in the night Tom always seemed taller and older than he really was. As if he was the young man he one day would be, instead of the small boy who’d only had a few years of primary schooling under his belt.

“Being different isn’t a crime.” I responded, this was always Tom’s opening argument in some form or another, and my response too was always more or less the same.

“But it’s not something they should be proud of, either, is it Lizzie?” He asked leaning forward in his bed, pale blue eyes gleaming, “After all, if you look at it from our perspective, they shouldn’t feel so confident. We’ve always been smarter than them, we’ve always had gifts that they can’t even understand, and if they were smart they’d learn their place.”

“Why are you so certain that there are designated slots in the world, places we have to be put in? And why are you certain that there isn’t someone that we fail to recognize, someone towering above us, while we’re just as oblivious as everyone else?” And here was where the arguments deviated that night, I didn’t always say this, in the beginning, when we were seven and Tom had lynched a rabbit I had first talked about morality in vague terms. This is Right, this is Wrong, this is the way of the world but Tom didn’t have morality hardwired into him and found such concepts laughable.

Then I’d brought in the philosophy of morality, attempting to explain why certain things were evil and some were not, why taking a life took away everything that a person could be, and why even the small suffering of others couldn’t be condoned.

But then Tom had looked up utilitarianism and had become not only convinced but also quite a bit more articulate with his arguments. The justification was simple, Tom enjoyed life more, I was tormented less, and this outweighed the suffering of Billy Stubbs over the death of his rabbit.

“If good or evil are real then wouldn’t I recognize it? Wouldn’t I know the same evil and same good that you know or even the others know?” Tom asked at one point, “If Hell really existed, wouldn’t I know the rules without having to be told? I don’t think there is good or evil, there can’t be.”

But that was then, we had progressed beyond Kant towards something far more existentialist.

“Of course there are slots.” Tom responded, looking somewhat confused but also intrigued, because whenever I said something that confused him he always took it as a sign that there was something I hadn’t told him yet. Some secret of the universe that only I knew that I hadn’t bothered to relate to him yet, “There’ve always been kings, nobles, merchants, and even orphans at the bottom. There’s always someone at the top.”

“But why are they at the top? You don’t believe in God so you can’t say it’s divine will that placed them there.” I pointed out and Tom appeared to consider this for a moment but then his face darkened as if a truly complicated thought was passing through his head.

“What’s it called when someone becomes a king after killing the old one, like in Macbeth?”

“A coup d’état.”

And that night, only eight years old, Tom said, “Then those are the true kings, the ones that take it for themselves, that’s how you get your slot in the world.”

Unspoken, but drifting between us, was Tom’s thought that he and I were true kings.

Perhaps Tom did plan to take over muggle England, he never said as much, at least not directly. He sometimes asked what I thought we should do once we left the orphanage and sometimes he would remark that he thought that he should become Prime Minister one day but he never said anything directly.

Until eleven he was more or less content to stay in the orphanage with me, to learn what he could there, and to go with me to see the world when we finally left. Once that was finished, once he’d seen what the world had to offer him, then he would become Napoleon, Alexander the Great, or else Julius Ceaser and conquer the known world.

 And I couldn’t help but think that sometimes Tom sounded just like Magneto had in what I remembered of the X-Men and sometimes he sounded even worse than Magneto ever had. Because Magneto had existed for his people, but for Tom and I, we were alone in the world as far as we knew.

So Tom existed, breathed, conquered for himself.

Of course, in its own way, everything changed when Albus Dumbledore arrived on our eleventh birthday.

* * *

The man in the canary yellow suit, an eye watering color if there ever was one, wasn’t what Tom would have pictured a psychologist looking like. Psychologist, another word he’d learned from Lizzie, because he’d seen this day coming for a while now.

It’d been a day where he’d been a little too obvious, where Mrs. Cole had been a little less drunk than usual, and he’d gotten the belt then been sent to their room. Lizzie had shown up only a short while later, like she always did, with that resigned and disappointed expression that he hated so very much.

It was the one she always wore when he used his powers to hurt the other orphans, but one day she’d understand and see why this was necessary. She would stop looking at him like that and she would instead smile in gratitude. Until then, though, he’d have to endure that small frown and those tired pale eyes.

But that day he’d been truly frightened, tense, and had thought that perhaps he’d gone too far this time. Gone so far that even his powers, powers that had so much potential but still so little use, couldn’t save him from what was coming. So when she came in he didn’t insist that he was right, that they deserved it this time, that they’d had it coming.

Instead he’d curled in on himself and waited for her to step closer, to brush his hair back from his head, and to be there in a way that only she could.

“She’s going to send a head doctor, isn’t she?” He’d asked the words sticking oddly in his throat, “I heard from Dennis that they have doctors for your head, for the inside, doctors that mark down what you think and throw you into the looney bin if they don’t like it.”

The idea, the idea of a man asking him questions and not liking the answers, throwing him away from the orphanage and even Lizzie terrified him beyond imagining. He’d never considered a thing like that, before that moment, he’d known that places like that existed but he’d never thought about how people wound up inside of them.

He’d never realized that people like him, people who didn’t think like them, were the ones who were stuffed inside.

“Psychologist, the term is psychologist.” Lizzie said softly, her soft pale hand moved through his hair, looking past him as her accent rolled slowly and sweetly, “And no, I don’t think she’ll call for a psychologist.”

“But she can.” He twisted his head so that he was looking directly at her, at the way the afternoon light hit her face, half of it golden and half of it dark.

“She can, but she won’t. That sort of thing costs money, money she doesn’t have, and ultimately this is a small thing. All of us, orphans, we all have things we could use a good psychologist for, we all could use years of therapy if we’re being honest. Today’s a day just like any other, she just happened to notice today, that’s all. She’ll just call you a demon, hit you with a belt, and that will be the end of it. You would have to do something much more… dramatic, for her to call in an expert.” She smiled then, that sad sort of smile that Lizzie wore so often, the one that he only ever saw on her face.

“So don’t worry, Tom, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She’d been right, but that had been years ago, and now there was a man he didn’t know in his room who’d come to ask him questions and then cart him off to the asylum.

And he was terrified.

He and Lizzie were seated on the bed, he was clutching Lizzie’s hand in a white knuckle grip, she was rubbing slow circles on the back of his hand with her thumb but all he could think about was how fast his heart was beating and how loud it was.

The man smiled at them, like they were his own children, like he was happy to see them, “Hello, Tom, Elizabeth. My name is Albus Dumbledore, I’ve come to…”

“I know why you’re here.” Tom interrupted, and the man blinked looking a little perplexed.

“Really?” He asked, his smile even growing somewhat, as if he was delighted despite his confusion.

“You’re from the asylum.” He said and the doctor’s eyebrows rose and he shook his head in denial, “She’s finally decided to get rid of me, she told you didn’t she, about everything!”

Now the man was looking a little wary, oh he had been told then, this had all been a little show. It was clear that he’d heard some of the nasty ones too, like about Dennis and Amy, and how neither Dennis nor Amy were ever going to be the same again after what happened.

The man opened his mouth, to deny it, to pretend, to lull Tom into a false sense of security so they could bloody cart him off to where he’d never see his sister again but Lizzie beat him to it.

“Tom, he’s not from the asylum.”

Tom turned to look at her, she looked solemn, resolute, but also certain. And Lizzie, sometimes there were things she didn’t quite understand, but she was never wrong about things like this. If Lizzie said he wasn’t from the asylum then he wasn’t from the asylum.

She would tell him later, after this man left, how she’d known and why it’d been so easy for her to tell.

Tom felt himself relax, the tension dripping from his shoulders, and a weak smile dancing on his lips.

“Right, as I was saying, I am a professor at a school that you both have been invited to attend.” The man smiled weakly and passed them both letters, their names written on the front, opening his Tom saw a crest for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry at the very top.

“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Lizzie said looking at his letter, she looked as if she’d just been hit or she fell down the stairs, a blanked dazed expression, “I’m in bloody fucking Harry Potter.”

“What?” Tom asked just in time for the professor to admonish, “That sort of language, my dear girl, isn’t tolerated in Hogwarts.”

She blinked over at them, looking as if she’d only just remembered they were there, and then asked with narrowed disbelieving eyes, “Albus Dumbledore, right? As in Albus Dumbledore, old, wise, and eccentric wizard?”

“Not too old, I should hope.” The man said, a little more self-consciously than he needed to, considering he didn’t have any gray hair but Lizzie just nodded a little bit.

“Right, okay, my entire world-view has just been flipped on its head. Don’t mind me, continue with the… introductions? You were at the, you and Tom are secretly wizards bit.” She gave a small hysterical laugh and Tom felt as if he’d been completely thrown out of the conversation, which wasn’t bad because he hadn’t wanted this focused on him, but what on earth were they even talking about?

More, the man now seemed very interested in Lizzie, so much that it was like he’d completely forgotten how much he’d disliked Tom.

“Witch, Miss Riddle, you are a witch, your brother is the wizard. Although, I do wonder, how did you know all this? After my conversation with Mrs. Cole I had expected that you two would have no idea, would be like other muggle born children.” The man adjusted his glasses, as if that would let him get a better view of her, and Tom didn’t like that. He didn’t like the idea of this man, this stranger, this… wizard, finding Lizzie special.

“Muggle?” Tom asked and the man glanced over toward him, as if only just remembering Tom was there too.

“Oh, yes, children who don’t have magical parents.”

“Magical? What do you mean magical?” Tom asked, almost panicking, because somehow the conversation had moved entirely beyond him. They had moved from insanity to magic and he had no idea how only that Hogwarts was involved and that Lizzie had somehow known.

“Have you ever noticed anything strange about you, Tom, or your sister? Have you ever been able to make things happen simply because you wanted them to? Ever had odd things happen around you?”

His powers, the man was talking about his powers. But, no he was also talking about Lizzie. He’d always just assumed Lizzie’s powers were different from his, that she just knew everything where he could affect everything. They complemented one another, but he hadn’t realized that she had what he had too, but that’s what this man was implying.

More, he was saying there were others, enough for a school…

“Yes, yes, odd things happen.” Lizzie answered for him still lost and dazed in her own world, “So we’re… a witch and a wizard. In England, during the depression… Attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the fall of next year. And I’m talking to Albus Dumbledore, this is my life.”

Both he and Lizzie, it seemed, were reeling.

“So, you accept then.” The man asked, perplexed, “Do you wish for me to explain?”

“Well, um, where do we buy things? For school, since we need the wands… and everything.”

The man then explained about Diagon Alley, even offered to go with them, which Tom hastily rejected saying that they would be fine. The man asked a few questions after that, asking how Lizzie had known all of this stuff, all of this stuff that Tom hadn’t, that she’d never even bothered to mention and in that moment all Tom knew was that he wanted this man out.

He didn’t like him, didn’t like his interest, the way he looked at Lizzie as if she was special. She was special, Tom knew that, but she wasn’t supposed to be noticed like this. Tom didn’t want her out in the open, burning brightly for anyone to see, he liked it when she was overlooked, when people didn’t realize how talented and brilliant she truly was.

He also didn’t like how in the dark he felt, how he hadn’t known any of this and she had, how she had never even bothered to tell him.

The man left, eventually, telling them he was excited to see them in the fall and reminding them that they couldn’t use magic anymore outside of school and then he was gone. Then it was only Tom and Lizzie, alone in the world, again.

And it was the first time he had felt this way about his sister.

A slow, overpowering anger, that started in his stomach and burned its way through his throat. The kind of anger that killed rabbits and hung them from rafters, that made the shadows in the room dance and the glass in the windows rattle in their frames.

“You knew this would happen.” He said, something in him cracking, because Lizzie had always had her secrets but they had never been like this. They had never been important secrets.

She laughed, like he had just told the funniest joke she’d heard in her life, “No, just, give me a moment, Tom… I can’t… Bloody fucking Harry Potter.”

And it was like she wasn’t even in the same room with him, had never been, she was off in her own head and not even bothering to look at him when he was demanding an explanation. Fuck, that word, she rarely used it. Only when she was thinking too hard or was too upset and forgot that there were words you weren’t supposed to use.

Fuck, bastard, son of a bitch, shit, motherfucker, cock sucker, he’d heard them throughout the years and each time she’d tell him that he was never ever to use the words she used. She wasn’t saying that today.

“And who the fuck is Harry Potter?”

That seemed to bring her back to her senses, all at once she looked present again, blinked over at him. Her eyes widened and a remorseful tortured expression appeared on her face, and this was better, but he didn’t like this either. Didn’t like that she felt she had something to regret.

“Tom, I, I’m so sorry.” She took a deep breath, “You have to understand that I didn’t know, that it was… It’s just a story to me, like every other story about knights and witches and castles. Just because I know things, Tom, doesn’t mean I always know if they’re real or not.”

So she did know, she’d known the whole time, and she hadn’t even bothered to say anything.

“That didn’t answer my question. You’ll answer my questions. All of them, you’ll tell me everything.” He said it in that voice that made it hard to refuse, the one that had Mrs. Cole and the orphans in line, and Lizzie looked tempted but she also looked at him in warning.

She was his twin, equal and opposite to him, one who had the same gifts that he had. They were the same, of course he couldn’t touch her like he could them. He shouldn’t want to, he hated her for making him want to, for forcing them to this.

“I can’t tell you everything, Tom, there’s too much.”

Before he could demand anything else she continued, “Harry Potter is the name of a prophesized hero, born many years from now, who battles the evil wizard Lord Voldemort and attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. His headmaster is Albus Dumbledor, his best friend Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, and he plays the broom stick sport. But that’s really all I know.”

It was, not what he expected, nothing about him or them or anything really important.

“That’s it, what about you, what about me?”

“I don’t know.” She said, a small regretful smile appearing on her lips, “I don’t… I don’t know the whole story, just bits and pieces, the main idea. I found, find, other things far more interesting. There are many stories about prophesized heroes and many of them take place in much more perilous and interesting places than a magical boarding school.” 

He wanted to hit her so much in that moment because she wasn’t lying. To her this was no different than the thousands of other stories that lived inside her head, it’d only been different when parts of it appeared on their doorstep. He wanted to feel betrayed, to feel like she’d left it out on purpose, not to have this understanding that she knew so much more than him that she’d overlooked it.

That while he could make things move and dance and do anything he wanted she would always know the truth about the universe. She would always have power beyond him. And that was why Dumbledore had found her so interesting, because he could see that, and that was why after Lizzie had drawn attention to herself the man hadn’t looked twice at Tom.

She hugged him, tightly to her, and he let the anger drip away slowly leaving a terrible ache in its place. He felt tired, all of a sudden, worn at the thought that they would have to wander to this Diagon Alley soon and find their school supplies. He should be excited, they were finally leaving, meeting others like them, but… He couldn’t muster the energy.

“Voldemort, what does that mean?”

“It’s French.” She said, her voice soft and soothing in his ear, “It could mean quite a few things, I suppose it depends on the context. It could be Flight of Death, Flight from Death, or even Theft of Death… Un vol du mort, who can say what it truly means?”

He should interrogate her, press while she was willing to talk, but he didn’t. He just nodded, tucked the idea of a Harry Potter back into his mind, and thought about everything to come next while desperately hoping that everything wasn’t secretly falling apart.


	3. Chapter 3

I want to talk about Dennis and Amy.

I want to linger in those early years, before 1938 and Albus Dumbledore’s grand revelation about the nature of our world. I want you to see what I see, when I look at those years, to know why they can’t simply be brushed away as if they meant nothing at all.

I want you to understand, everything, and for that I need to linger.

I need to talk about Dennis and Amy.

There were several distinct moments in our early childhood that would shape who we would become and our relationship with each other. Tom’s lynching of Billy Stubb’s rabbit was one such moment, jerking me from my own stance as an apathetic philosopher to Tom’s moral advisor, and Tom from an ordinary human being to something extraordinary and more terrible for it.

Dennis and Amy, that was the second moment, and in some ways the more influential.

I think it was the first time where Tom and I looked at each other, really looked, and for a single instant saw what we truly were and worse, what we could become.

We were ten years old, on the annual trip we took to the beach, one which had lingered despite Mrs. Cole’s descent into contempt and alcoholism that had eroded at every other part of her good nature.

It had started out like almost every other beach trip had, Tom and me being separated from everyone else, and trying to come up with ways to be entertained for a few hours when neither of us had any real interest in swimming and hadn’t bothered to bring books we’d already read twelve times.

Usually Tom managed to come up with something, particularly since he’d discovered his mutant powers. He would then demonstrate to me by skipping rocks with his mind into the water, shaping the waves, or lighting driftwood on fire. However, it had been a few years since Tom had discovered his abilities, and with practice such exercises were child’s play to him, the novelty of showing off to me at the beach had long since worn off.

So, as chance would have it, both Tom and I were bored out of our fucking minds.

“Lizzie, will you teach me French?” Tom asked, his eyes dully watching as the other children splashed about in the water, his expression managing to mix boredom and contempt together masterfully.

Tom, after discovering his own telekinetic abilities, had come to the incorrect conclusion that I was omniscient. Or at least, that’s what it seemed like. He never openly said I knew everything, but he always expected me to know the answer, and well… Most of the time I did, or at least would have a decent not-answer, not that I knew why but still. Just because I didn’t have an explanation for my own weirdness or its limits didn’t mean he couldn’t assume there weren’t any.

“I don’t know any French.” This wasn’t exactly true, I knew passable French, barely passable French. Sit me in front of a children’s French show and I might be able to tell you what was going on, perhaps, and I could probably speak in fragmented wrong-tense French when forced to, but that was nothing worthy of saying something along the lines of “Je parle français” with confidence.

Tom looked dubious.

“Fine, I don’t know that much French.” I amended, moodily adding, “I can talk about how many cats I own, how I’m feeling, and ask if you want to go to the beach, but that’s about where my foreign language skills end.”

Cue Tom looking a little more petulant than usual, “So, you’re not going to teach me then." 

“I didn’t say that, just don’t expect miracles.”

“What’s the point of learning something if you don’t intend to master it?” Tom retorted, staring off into the sea, and normally I was above responding to Tom when he was like this (because my god that boy’s temper was short) but I wasn’t in the mood in being above anything.

“Je ne sais pas, mais, peut-être c’est la vie.” Was this perhaps a bit more English of a phrasing than it should have been? Perhaps. But did I really care? Not so much.

Instead of answering Tom’s eyes wandered further down the beach and eventually caught on something, a fair distance away, visible but only just, “We should go to that cave over there.”

He stood, already starting to walk, and I scrambled after him, “Don’t you think that’s a little far, Tom?”

Even Tom and I, unloved and unpopular children that we were, were given strict limits on how far we were supposed to wander. And Jesus, what if we went too far and actually forgot about us? I wouldn’t think Mrs. Cole would do it on purpose but she was inclined to forgetfulness sometimes and it wasn’t like the other children would remind her that she forgot their tormentor and his sister.

And then where would we be? Stuck on a beach on the coast, looking for a bus that would take us back to London, hoping to god they had pity on poor children and let us ride for free…

Tom, however, found it beneath him to worry about those sorts of details. So he walked forward, and in frustration and resignation, I followed.

Now, here’s where Dennis and Amy enter the picture.

Picture this, Dennis and Amy, paint them as they once were inside of your imagination. Imagine and memorize every freckle, every stray hair, immortalize them for yourselves.

They are about to change irrevocably.

Dennis was tall for his age, a towering goliath with the few years he had on me and Tom, and being an orphan had taught him to use this to his advantage. After all, Dennis with his height, his broadness, his plain features would never be considered cute like Billy or even Tom to the unobservant. Dennis would never be considered the brightest or the best of anything. Deep down Dennis knew that the only way the he would get out, could get out, was by climbing over top of everyone else.

And Dennis started young.

Amy was the opposite, small, blonde, bow ties in her hair and a constant blush to her cheeks. Amy wore worn, white, but desperately cared for shoes to Sunday church and beamed up at the preacher. Amy should have been the darling of any prospective parent’s eye, if only she wasn’t so old and if only circumstances had been in her favor. If Amy had been in any other orphanage, had never met Tom Riddle, then perhaps she would have been adopted.

Dennis and Amy would both turn out to be horrifically unlucky.

They should have nothing to do with each other let alone to do with Tom and I at the beach on that fateful day.

If they were just a little more clever, older, then maybe they would have realized that there’s some dragons you simply don’t wake.

But they weren’t older and they weren’t clever.

They were young, Dennis burning with visceral hatred and envy and Amy with the need to toe the line and prevent others from doing what was forbidden and bad, and when Tom and I made our way over to the gaping mouth of the cave Dennis must have spotted us and gone charging off and Amy must have fluttered behind anxiously, telling him we weren’t supposed to go that far…

But I didn’t know that yet.

I was busy feeling the stone beneath my bare feet, clutching at my arms in an attempt to stay warm, and staring around at this otherworldly place with a feeling of both wonder and disquiet. It was like Gollum’s cave, I would think, deep in the depths of the Misty Mountains on the edge of a lake.

Even with Tom’s artificial light, dancing in his hands, it was cold, dark, with a dark damp scent to the air that you expected something malevolent to be inside. There were riddle games to be won and lost in places such as these…

Naturally, Tom loved the fucking place.

“We should probably head out soon, Tom.” I said, with more shivering than I would have liked but more than done with all this cave business.

Honestly, what was wrong with the beach? Sure, it was an English beach, I could have used a bit warmer, maybe in France or something, but I was a penniless orphan and realistically satisfied with my rocky English shore.

Not to mention, as I eyed the entrance, the tide was dangerously close to covering our way out. If we stayed too long then we’d have a hell of a time trying to swim out without getting our heads bashed on rocks.

“You’ve never seen anything like this Lizzie, have you?” Tom asked, a bright and surprisingly boyish grin on his face as he danced towards the edge of a still salt water lake on the inside, peering out over the water to where a lone still island was only just visible.

“No,” I said softly, but this was only a half-truth, because this place resonated inside of me even then, an almost perfect replica of that lake cavern and lake beneath the Misty Mountains, and the small island that Gollum lived upon, living upon raw fish, as the ring stole his mind.

“I bet the other orphans wouldn’t ever think of coming somewhere like this, they’re all sitting at the beach or playing in the water.” Tom’s scoff told Lizzie what he thought of that, not that this was surprising, since Tom had always considered the hobbies and past times of most of the population beneath him.

Tom would never realize it, would never peer too closely at his own inner workings long enough to notice, but he was more contrary than he was innately unique. Tom would observe his peers and set out to enjoy or do exactly the opposite of them, because in Tom’s mind to be extraordinary was to share nothing in common with the vulgar masses. For all the confidence he exuded, and his faith in his own prowess, so very much of him was artificial at the end of things.

This habit of his, quirk of his personality, would last long after his early childhood.

“Yes, well, they may have a point Tom, we don’t want to be trapped in here when the tide comes in.”

I grabbed at his arm then, remembering that while we were technically the same age (a few seconds older on my end barely counted), I was probably closer to being the adult in the situation and no matter how willfully stubborn Tom could get I could still bully him into being reasonable. Or, at the very least, try to.

“I don’t want to go yet, Lizzie!” He tried to jerk his arm out of my grip, lightly, with more petulance than anger, but I held tight and tugged him along leaving him to pout at the rocky ground for not getting his way.

Remember, for all the traits he had then and now, he was only ten years old then. He was still only a child, we both were.

“We’ll come back next year, we’ll start earlier, alright?”

He didn’t nod, instead his pout soured further and he spared a glance for that lonely island across the still lake, the light he had produced growing dimmer and dimmer.

And perhaps it changed nothing, what happened next, perhaps everything would have been the same even if it hadn’t happened, everything would have turned out the way it did before. Perhaps we were doomed, as characters in tragedies often are.

But then, perhaps not, perhaps that moment was everything. Perhaps if it hadn’t happened then Tom wouldn’t have… Well… This is delusion, of course, Tom always was what Tom was. He’d always find some way to justify himself, I’m sure. Just as I kept finding ways to lie to myself, or to be optimistic, or to think to myself that people can change and that surely this is all I can do.

No, this wasn’t even my first warning, that was the rabbit.

Still, what do you do when your brother is a monster? What can you do?

This is the story of how I ended up in the dark tower, after all, inside a room with no windows and no doors, it’d be remiss of me not to tell all of it.

Thus, into Gollum’s cave, enter Dennis and Amy Bishop.

Amy’s voice was the first thing we heard, a whining high pitched voice that had past the point of cute and bordered obnoxious, “Dennis, you’re not supposed to be here! You know that, Mrs. Cole will beat you black and blue if you don’t come back!”

Then Dennis came into view, and as he caught sight of us, at the swiftly dimming faerie light suspended in midair, his face stretched into a grin, “I knew it, I knew you two were demon twins!”

Amy scuttled in behind and stopped, staring transfixed at the light, and her face paled then as the implications started to set in. That Mrs. Cole’s drunken ravings, when she was at her least reasonable, were right after all.

That Tom and I really were devil children.

Tom’s face hardened, his grip on my hand tightened, and the light suddenly became far brighter, then with a brittle tone he asked, “You going to tell on us, then?”

But Dennis wasn’t paying attention, instead he was staring up at the light then back at Tom, “Is that it? That’s all a demon twin can do? Not very impressive, is it?”

I didn’t say anything, held Tom’s hand tighter, and instead of words what was running through my head were all the things that could happen. Dennis could hit me, he could hit Tom, he’d done it before, but then someone had always been nearby, Mrs. Cole for all her alcoholism would be nearby and if not her then the schoolteacher or one of Mrs. Cole’s assistants…

Tom could hurt Dennis, he’d hurt him before, he’d hurt all of the orphans before but then… But then it’d always been small things, pushing people down stairs, tripping them over nothing, and true sometimes they were really hurt from that but… But Tom had never been in a real fight, not really, he was all about psychologically destroying his opponent, proving his inherent superiority, he’d never truly been in a fight…

And not with Dennis, Dennis who was three times our size, and so very angry.

Amy shook, staring up at the light, eyes flickering to the two of them, “Dennis, come back, come back to the beach and…”

Dennis suddenly reached out, pushed me backwards, causing me to almost stumble into Tom, “Hey, it’s not very useful, is it? I bet you can’t do anything useful. Bet that’s why you got thrown out of hell, isn’t that right?”

I licked my lips, tasting the salt and darkness on the air, and said slowly, “Dennis, we don’t want any trouble…”

“Don’t want any trouble?” He turned to Amy with a grin, as if including her in the conspiracy, “You hear that strawberry, demoness here says she doesn’t want any trouble! Should have thought about that before you started nicking my things, shouldn’t you?”

He pushed me again, I made to go around him but he blocked the way, shoving me backwards again, this time actually causing me to crash into Tom, “Think I don’t know it was you, little demon! Well, every time before your demon magic has saved your bacon, and when it doesn’t little demoness goes running to Mrs. C who belts us both, but Mrs. C isn’t here, is she? And I bet your devil magic isn’t nearly as fancy as you think it is.”

The light, almost fluorescent now, started to flicker as if it was produced by a bulb, the water inside the cave began to churn, and a wind picked up and rose, yet even with the wind Tom’s voice was almost soft for all that it was cutting, “Is that what you think?”

This was the moment, if Dennis had left then, if Amy had managed to pull him out or left herself instead of tugging uselessly at his arm, then it might not have happened. Dennis may have tried again but he would have lacked opportunity, we were leaving soon after all, and once we had met Albus Dumbledore then Tom would consider himself so far above these muggles that they would not even be worth sneering at.

But I…

I moved forward, forcing my way through, still grabbing onto Tom who was trying to stand his ground, eager for the fight I was so desperate to avoid, but this time Dennis pushed back harder and I…

I let go, I fell back, my head hit the ground and there was a moment of sharp pain then dullness. Amy let out some sort of a cry then, distantly heard by me, and for a moment I was just floating there, even as the light changed and Tom surged forward.

I stared up at the ceiling, bright then dark, then bright again, a strobe light effect taking place, time seeming to slow as light came in short bursts, my brother, Dennis, and Amy taking on the guises of inhuman spirits in inconsistent light, while I just stared at them trying to understand what I was seeing.

There was struggling, one of them moved away, tried to get out, but she was flung back in, into the lake instead and she was screaming… And Dennis, Dennis flew backwards to, into a wall, and then stopped moving, became sluggish, but then he also was in the water.

Both of them went under.

I struggled to my feet, moving forward, my tongue feeling swollen, Tom was staring at their hands, at the places where their head should have been, but instead their heads were under, still under.

“Tom…”

I felt dizzy, he didn’t look back, just kept watching, a fascinated gleam in his pale eyes, dark and light in the strobe light effect.

The arms grew more desperate, wild, but the light was still flickering and so it looked slow somehow, disjointed, still inhuman.

“Tom.”

I tripped over rocks, stumbling forward, but still heading towards him, that surreal feeling of being trapped in a nightmare growing. He leaned forward, curiously, his arms behind his back, his fingers steady…

“Tom!”

I stumbled into him, shook him, and at once the light was bright and steady once again and he blinked at me. This time, this time his hand shook as he lifted it to caress my cheek, and he said slowly, uncertainly, “He hurt you, Lizzie…”

And suddenly I felt slightly more lucid, reality crashing down, and the arms flailing began to make sense, and with sharp horror I lunged towards them, pulling at the first, smaller pair I found with Tom watching from behind.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…”

She wasn’t coming up, no matter how much I pulled Amy wasn’t pulling up, but she was pulling me down, pulling me down to climb over top of me and then Tom was jerking me backwards, “Lizzie, what are you doing?!”

“She’s drowning, they’re drowning, they’re going to drown, we have to get them out, why can’t I get them out?”

“Lizzie, she was going to drown you with her!”

He looked so much older than ten, his eyes burning, and he was so steady when I was still shaking.

“We have to get them out, we have to get them out or they’re going to die, oh my god they’re going to die…”

“Maybe they should die.”

And when I looked at him then I saw… There was no pity, no compassion, only a great and overwhelming contempt for mankind. He didn’t say anything else, he didn’t need to, and neither did I.

Because in that moment I think we saw each other more clearly than we ever had in our lives.

“Tom, let them go.”

I reached forward, grabbing his shoulders, “Let them go!”

They came up, I reached and pulled them out, and they were both so still and so pale…

They both lived, we dragged them both back to the beach, I performed what I vaguely remembered of CPR praying to god I wasn’t doing it wrong, while Tom watched with quiet rage as my lips touched Dennis’, and thank god at some point they stirred and were alive and… I ran to tell Mrs. Cole that we had found them there, of course she didn’t believe me…

Amy fared better, she became very ill for a while, but after the fever passed she recovered. All the same, she never was quite the same Amy Bishop that she once had been. She grew pale, thin, easily prone to illness, and so terribly nervous about the things that went bump in the night.

She would die of pneumonia only a few years later inside of the orphanage.

As for Dennis, in some ways he fared worse. Dennis had been under longer, and deprived of oxygen his brain had starved, and when he came out it was with brain damage. He could talk, but it was slower and slurred, and far more simple, he repeated himself, had emotional tantrums, regressed in his education and just… He lived, true, but in many ways he didn’t.

I don’t know what happened to Dennis afterwards, he was alive last I knew, but times have changed and for all I know he could be dead as well.

And as for Tom and I, a few short months later, in the winter, Albus Dumbledore would arrive in a canary yellow suit with a letter addressed to each of us.

But rest assured, my friends, that even I will get my just deserts in the end.

First, they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

* * *

 “Well, it’s not exactly how I’d pictured it.”

Tom and Lizzie had just gotten past the barkeep in the Leaky Cauldron after walking through what had seemed like half of London and it was everything Tom had ever imagined and more in the week since Professor Dumbledore had come to deliver their letters.

The anger, then the numbness that had followed it, had faded over the course of a few days and in its place, was the excitement and eagerness he’d expected to start with. It had hit him, suddenly, almost out of the blue that he had his answers.

Finally, he had a word for what he was… What Lizzie was too for that matter, they weren’t like the stupid orphans, and now he could finally prove it.

Only…

Tom stared at the people, all the people dressed in strange colorful robes, bustling through the streets, strung up with holiday lights still that seemed almost like faerie magic, and it glowed so brightly, more brightly than anything Tom had seen in London… Muggle London.

In his own gray worn clothes, holding tightly onto Lizzie’s hand, it struck him then how dirty and starved he must look to these people.

And there were so many of them, and instead of something extraordinary he was just… One of them.

“Tom?”

Tom started, looked to the side to find Lizzie staring at him, and her eyes were cutting through again, like they always did, seeing through any pretense of his before he even tried to put it up.

“Sorry, I… How’d you picture it, Lizzie?”

Lizzie paused, stared, eyes flicking through the stores, and then mused slowly, “Well, to be honest, I can’t quite remember what I was expecting. It looks similar, certainly, although the Christmas decorations are a nice touch that I hadn’t expected, I guess they’re just as lazy as we are and if it’s Christmas in December it can damn well stay Christmas until the end of January… All the same, there’s just… Small differences.”

Except Lizzie wasn’t talking as if she was imagining what it would look like, but instead as if she had seen it, or a rendering of it before, and was now trying to think back and remember.

And then with a sudden flash Tom remembered how irritated he’d been with her, “Well, if you’re so well informed then why don’t you tell me what we’re supposed to do now?”

Lizzie’s eyes slid to his, and she said nothing for a moment, then, “Tom, if I had known it was relevant I would have said something. You know that, don’t you?”

Yes, but also no, because why did Lizzie get to decide what was relevant and what wasn’t? Why, if they were the same, if she was like him, did she have all of this information available and Tom had nothing? If Lizzie had Tom’s powers, if she was a witch and he was a wizard, then why didn’t he have hers?

Why was she the one who got to know everything?

“To answer your question though, I believe Dumbledore said something about a different currency, and about a starving orphan scholarship fund for that matter, and that our first stop would be to set up accounts in the bank.” Lizzie said, then peering down the street she said, “If I’m going to take a stab in the dark I’m guessing it’s that marble roman looking building over there with the columns. That looks rather impressive and financial.”

Tom walked forward, having nothing really to say but wanting something scathing all the same, but he couldn’t think of anything because as irritated as he was by all of this it wasn’t exactly Lizzie’s fault either.

Tom had his talents and she’d always had hers to, he couldn’t begrudge her that, even if they should have been his talents too.

“You’d think we were in an entirely different country…” Lizzie said, “A different currency, the clothing, and the depression hasn’t seemed to have touched them at all. Look at this place.”

“It’s much better than muggle Britain,” Tom said, making sure to use that word, the correct word, muggle, he’d have to memorize and make sure nothing else ever slipped through his lips. That was muggle Britain now, and he and his sister didn’t belong there anymore, not that they ever had in the first place.

“The British Empire has seen better days,” Lizzie agreed slowly but then added, “But then, things change relatively quickly, perhaps in twenty years England will reclaim its glory, perhaps it won’t, who can really say?”

“You can, can’t you?”

She stopped, and there was that look, that haunting look that sometimes haunted his nightmares, that silent creeping fear in her eyes as she looked at him. And he… He hadn’t meant it, he never meant it, it always just seemed to happen and he really hadn’t meant it this time he just…

“I’m sorry,” Tom blurted and with that the look faded and something worn and resigned took its place on her delicate features.

“It’s alright,” she was forcing herself to say it, forcing that twitching thin smile on her lips, “It doesn’t matter anyways, because for future reference Tom, I’m not prescient.”

“What’s…”

“I can’t see the future, hell, if I could do that don’t you think I would have told you that middle aged Albus Dumbledore would show up on our doorstep in a yellow suit that Elton John himself would cringe at?”

“Who’s…”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter either, ask me later, at any rate we’re here so we should probably do this account thing. Although I find it disturbing that a pair of ten year olds can open a banking account, especially when we have absolutely no money between the pair of us.” Lizzie kept muttering as she walked in, leaving Tom to dart and catch up, and as he did he found his eyes widening at the sight of the place.

It was larger than any building he’d ever been inside, looking almost like parliament did in Tom’s imagination, or perhaps even Westminster Abbey, everything was white and black, but there was gold too in the form of chandeliers and teller’s windows. Everything glittered and was polished and men and women bustled in speaking with tellers and then disappearing through a great gilded doorway where Tom could not see.

Then his eyes caught on the people, and he saw Lizzie staring too, the tellers they weren’t… They couldn’t be human, they were short, malformed, their grey skin clinging to their bones, their eyes dark and without irises, while their noses were long hooked and curved.

“Tom, don’t stare, don’t comment just… Act like everyone else.” Lizzie said, and with that she seemed to shake herself out of it and approached the teller, again leaving Tom to stare at everything, feeling so flustered and awed and just so many things, while following dutifully behind.

“Uh, hello,” Lizzie said to the available teller with a cheerful grin, one that faltered when the teller said nothing back, merely stared with those dark bird like eyes, “My name is Elizabeth Riddle and this is my brother Tom, we’re uh… Muggle born students, for our first year in Hogwarts, and uh… Well, we have no parents and no money, but Professor Dumbledore said there was a scholarship fund, or something? And that we should set up accounts…”

Lizzie trailed off uncertain, the creature set down its quill a great black feathered thing that looked as if it had been plucked from a crow, and then his lips parted to reveal a shark like grin with daggers for teeth, “Yes, we were informed by Hogwarts…”

“Oh, good, that’s… great.” Lizzie said and paled when the creature passed an iron key through the teller’s window.

“This is the key to your vault, do not lose it.”

Lizzie nodded and placed it inside of the small bag she had carried with her from the orphanage. The creature then, after watching the key depart, said in that same strange and aggressive tone, “Each year a small sum shall be added to your vault by the school to provide for your education, room, and board during the year. With it you will be able to purchase your school supplies and everything you should need. Do not overspend.”

Lizzie nodded rapidly and with hesitation Tom did too.

The goblin passed her a small pouch and Lizzie opened it, showing it to Tom, and at first it seemed black, bottomless, but then a glint of copper caught his eye, “This will connect to your vault, use it to purchase what you need, should you need access to your vault simply return and come to a teller and we will assist you.”

“Of course, thank you.” Lizzie stammered out when it appeared the thing had finished.

It grinned again then, but there was no happiness inside of it, no joy, only a sharp avarice and contempt, “Goodday, Mr. and Miss Riddle.”

And with that it seemed like they were dismissed and they quickly exited back out the way they came, Tom not eager to spend another second there and Lizzie apparently not either, “What were they?”

Lizzie breathed out, pulling him with her, and then stopping at the bottom of the steps and looking back with raised eyebrows, “Uh… Well, does goblin seem like a reasonable answer? Because I think they might be goblins… Only very different from The Lord of the Rings variety, or Labyrinth’s for that matter…”

“Goblins?” Lizzie had told him stories about them before and… Well, if he remembered right they’d been inclined to eating children, or at the very least small beings.

“Yes… Tom, we’re not going over our budget.” Lizzie said and Tom agreed, because whatever the consequence was for debts, he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

“Right, now to get the supplies, let’s pray to God that these textbooks aren’t as much as I think they’re going to be…”

They were as much, so much so that they had no choice but to get only the school books and worn secondhand ones at that, their robes too were second hand and strangely faded when compared to those on display in the window, the cauldrons dented…

And all the same the amount of money was less and less and Lizzie’s face became a tight grimace.

They were just outside their final stop, the wand shop, with their backs to the faded stone entryway, and Lizzie was staring ahead into the street and Tom along with her, “The wands from Ollivanders’ are covered in the budget, so we don’t have to worry about that, alright Tom?”

Tom said nothing, thinking instead of the figure Lizzie had been presented with, their yearly budget and…

“How much money do we really have, Lizzie?”

“Unfortunately, they still appear to be on the gold standard, while the Britain we live in isn’t anymore. Even if they were both on the gold standard though it’s hard to say how much a wizard or a goblin values gold versus the rest of the world… I expect the exchange rates are rather inaccurate in terms of the British pound, they don’t seem too inclined to keep an eye on the exchange market. All that said, judging by the prices, we seem to have run through a good chunk of the fund for the year already, as they no doubt intended.”

She smiled at him then, a bright almost too cheerful thing, “We’re poor, Tom, frankly we’re lucky we’ve gotten this much, gotten this opportunity at all… We should be grateful.”

Grateful, for being poor, for being a muggle born orphan?

Before he could say as much though Lizzie reached into her bag, past the newly bought text books, and handed him a thin black one that he hadn’t noticed her buying earlier, “Here, I got this for you.”

He took it, it was a black plain journal, empty inside, the cover a worn leather, “Why?”

“Well, Christmas, our birthday, pick your poison.”

“I didn’t…”

“You didn’t have to get me anything, Tom, besides, I’m the one who’s been holding the money so you hardly had the opportunity.” Lizzie said with a smile, then stretched and turned back towards the shop, “At any rate, we’ve got one last stop before heading back, so let’s make the most of it, alright?”

It was plainer than all the other shops so far, like the shop of an artisan carpenter rather than anything truly mystical, there were tables, a chair in the corner, and a great wall of thin wooden boxes at the end of the room.

And as soon as they stepped in a man was in front of them, “Ah, new Hogwarts students I see, muggle born too.”

The man’s eyes drifted behind them, and then startled back to them alarmingly with the lack of an adult, unlike many of the other shopkeepers though he did not ask where their parents were.

“Right, I’m Elizabeth Riddle and this is my brother Tom, we’re here for our wands.”

“Of course, of course, I see everyone, sometimes more than once too, although there never is a wand like the first one, is there?” The man stopped then, stared at them, no he seemed to stare through them and his eyes narrowed, “And you two, I have a feeling I shall remember both of you for some time.”

Before either of them could respond the man grinned and declared, “The boy first, if you please.”

“Wand hand out, your dominant hand…”

Tom reached out with his right hand and watched as a floating measuring tape appeared and stretched itself, measure his arm, then his face, his hand, and even his eyes, “Yes, yes, all very good, very good… You know, there are legends about magical twins, even fraternal ones.”

The tape measure snapped closed and then disappeared, the man walked to the back of the shop and began rummaging through boxes.

“Really?” Tom asked, his interest peaked even as the man returned with a box.

“Try this one,” He said, opening the box and handing a wand to Tom, but before Tom could even do anything with it the man shook his head and placed it back into the box, heading to the back of the room once again and this time grabbing, seemingly at random, a whole stack of boxes.

“Certainly, Apollo and Artemis, and of course Remus and Romulus who founded the great city of Rome. They say that twins, magical twins, share a great bond between them, a magic that we single born cannot hope to understand.” The man said as he returned returned, opened the first box, and handed the wand to Tom.

This time he allowed Tom to get a good look at it, a dark thin stick, but more than that, elegantly carved with a handle and a spiraling pattern of wood.

“Give it a swish,”

Tom did so and…

And the man practically ripped it out of his hand and handed him the next one, “You’re quite tricky my young friend. Yes, it appears you’ll make my work cut out for me, Mr. Riddle.”

Tom frowned, “Why is it so hard, won’t any wand do?”

“Oh no, no, you see the wand chooses the wizard. And you, my friend, are a very particular customer. There is a wand inside of my shop that will suit you, but where others may be suited by five or ten, there will only be one for you.” The man smiled then, and leaned forward as if to convey either a great secret or a terrible pun, “Not to worry though, I’m not going anywhere.”

He handed another wand to Tom, and Tom, taking it with perhaps too much uncertainty and caution, found himself thinking over those other words, “Sir, can you tell us more about magical twins?”

“There are the famous cases, even among muggles as I’ve said, however twins you’ll find are rarer here than even with muggles. I’m hardly an expert, if you want details you’ll have to consult the Hogwarts library.”

Even though this was only teasing knowledge, barely knowledge at all, all the same Tom almost felt relieved. Because he and Lizzie weren’t just poor and like everyone else, they were still different, still better and great and superior. Twins, magical twins… And he’d always known that, hadn’t he?

They ran through all the boxes, Ollivander dutifully carting them to the back of the room, and this time he hesitated before grabbing another one, and then he slowly stepped off into a corner of the room to one of the very last boxes on the shelf, “I wonder…”

He walked over to Tom and handed it to him, and this time, this time he felt it, a spark rushing through him and out, through the wood, and swishing it there was a great and brilliant light at the end.

“Yes, it seems this is your wand. Yew and phoenix feather, a rare and difficult core, and an unrelenting wood for that matter. The phoenix who donated that feather only donated one other and I suspect that the bearers of both shall do great things in time.”

He stared at Tom again, through him, and this time Tom didn’t flinch because he was seeing Tom for his potential, no, his destiny, for everything Tom would become. And Tom, Tom was not the orphan he was dressed as, no, he was a wizard, and the wand in his hand thrumming with power was all he needed to prove it.

“Alright, Elizabeth next, please,”

Lizzie stood, walked over to him, and he handed her a box immediately, “Now this, this is the brother wand, with the feather of the same phoenix…”

Lizzie eyed the wand speculatively, the dark holly wood reflected in her eyes, gave it a swish as Tom had done only moments before…

But there was nothing, nothing at all.


	4. Chapter 4

He was not always so bad.

I… You have to realize that all I have is retrospect, all I can do is look back, look back over and over and over again and ask myself why it happened or if it had to happen at all.

I should have seen it coming, I cry to myself in despair. I should have noted the signs and seen where they inevitably led rather than hoping and praying and believing that they could possibly lead anywhere else. What glorious irony, that I, who had seen so much, had somehow missed everything that led me to where I am today.

And when swallowing bitter irony is all that’s left to you, falling into endless despair forever, it’s so hard to do anything else.

Except, he was not always so bad, and there are times that I can so easily imagine an ideal world where his best and brightest qualities shine. He is so intelligent, so passionate, so driven and glowing and yes sometimes even admirable. So that you can hardly look at him without feeling blinded.

More than that though, he was my brother, my only real companion in this world for those first eleven years of my life. For all that I insisted that other people mattered, that the other orphans mattered, Tom and I had been isolated for so long that just as I was undoubtedly his world he was mine.

I wish that I lived in some other world, that we both lived in some other world. A world where we could have grown together, even gone to Hogwarts, and stepped out of its gates hand in hand, with Tom’s smile filled with light and joy as it had so often been when he was small.

He’d show me a snake in the orphanage yard, whispering to it and holding it up towards me, watching as it flicked out its tongue in greeting and whispered a shy and hissing, “ _Hello_ ”, and laugh at my stunned and startled expression at the idea that snakes could talk and think.

Because that was Tom Riddle too.

And even now, even after everything that he’s done, after everything I’ve done, and I’ve failed to do, I miss him. 

Every moment, every second, I miss him. I miss what he was, I miss what he could have been, I perhaps even miss what he is and whatever he’s doing now.

I imagine whatever worlds he’s inhabiting, exploring, and conquering now. I picture him a proud young man, tall, dark, and so terribly handsome walking through the streets of London, Paris, or perhaps even Tokyo. I imagine the fire in his pale eyes, mirrors of my own, that reflect so much of the world inside of them. I picture the smile that curves his lips upwards, and even though I can’t help but imagine he’s unhappy, that some part of me vindictively wishes he is cursed with misery until the end of time, I hope that happiness has somehow managed to find him. And I hope, that when he looks at the early morning sky or the rain, when he looks at his own growing and changing reflection, he remembers me.

No matter what he’s done to anyone else, what he’s going to do, and what he’s done to me I… I can’t help but miss him.

And god, I wish I didn’t. I wish I could coldly shut him out and simply shut down, remind myself of Billy’s rabbit, of Dennis and Amy, of every single moment he had proven himself a monster but I…

This doesn’t interest you, does it?

Or, perhaps it does, but perhaps you don’t find it much of an excuse. I wouldn’t, and it isn’t really, an excuse that is. I have no excuses, I’ve come to accept that. Or, if not accept it, then acknowledge it.

I am not merely my brother’s hapless victim if I am indeed his victim at all.

These are simply the consequences I face, the weight and burden I must bear for my complicity and my silence. This, this place I’ve ended up in, the end of my story, is simply kismet. And if I hear his voice echoing in my mind, screaming in agony and despair and reaching out towards me, calling my name and searching, or else whispering it in a strange and earnest sorrow, then that is my burden as well.

You don’t need excuses for me, I make none for myself.

No, I only have a story and I believe I left off in January 1938 with the arrival of Albus Dumbledore.

Well, that was certainly a moment, wasn’t it? Not an easy one either. That was, I think that was when something of a wall came up between Tom and me.

Maybe I never saw it, maybe we’d always been teetering on a knife’s edge, ready to fall off on opposite sides from one another. Maybe our world was just so small then that we couldn’t gravitate away from one another until we left the orphanage. I don’t think so though, even looking back I don’t think that’s it.

Tom never really forgave me for not telling him about Hogwarts, or, if he did, then he never forgave me for my abilities and foreknowledge that he didn’t have. Before then, he’d once said, that we were like two sides of the same coin, that his telekinetic abilities complimented my vast mental wisdom and adult awareness. In other words, we were different in and both powerful in our own way, there was no real competition or rivalry between the pair of us.

Then Dumbledore comes out of nowhere, I recognize him, and more he says that Tom and I share a singular gift. Suddenly it’s not equal and opposite, but instead Elizabeth having something that Tom, for whatever reason, does not. I didn’t realize it at the time, wouldn’t realize it for years, but that weighed on Tom.

That through some act of fate, some genetic lottery, through even the fact that we were fraternal rather than identical, we were not one in the same after all.

Then there was Diagon Alley and the wands, Tom getting one, and me another but not the brother wand that was instead stored away for some future witch or wizard. Tom was so quiet as we’d taken the terrifying wizard trolley (which apparently prided itself on making the sharpest turns possible) back to the orphanage, he’d stared out the windows, looked at the darkening sky and curled his fingers around his purchased wand until they were bloodless.

He’d asked me when we stepped off the bus, quietly, in a soft and shaking voice, “Lizzie, why do you think you didn’t get the brother wand?”

All I could do was look at him, at his wide blue eyes that expected me to know everything in the world, and all I could do was shake my head and say, “I’m sorry, Tom, but I don’t know.”

He hugged me so tightly, only eleven and so terrified, as if he was afraid I’d disappear right then and there, like all those years of my existence had only been some wonderful dream that was now ending…

And perhaps it was, perhaps even then, it already was.

The world, I think, simply wasn’t wide enough for the pair of us.

Fall, 1938, Tom and I boarded the Hogwarts Express with secondhand luggage, secondhand books, secondhand school supplies, secondhand clothing, a bag of dwindling coins, and firsthand wands all we had to our names. We sat alone in a compartment, two unwanted and unknown muggleborn orphans, watching the green hills of England then Scotland rolling by, and there we divided four Hogwarts houses between us to best pick our destiny.

And even now, not even in the corner of my mind but at the front of it as if he’s still sitting here beside me with that boyish smile and delighted eyes, I can hear him asking, “But Lizzie, why would anyone want to go anywhere but Slytherin?”

* * *

Lizzie just gave him a look, peering over the top of the Transfiguration school book they’d both read at least twelve times already. Although Lizzie, he had to admit, found the book beyond fascinating in a way even Tom couldn’t.

Of course, the idea of any magic, of mutating things and changing their form, appealed to him on a level he couldn’t even describe. The acts described there, the extent a wand could help, him, everything he’d done until now was simply parlor tricks. With a wand in hand, he’d realized, he and Lizzie truly could become masters of the universe.

If he had to pick a favorite though, even before taking any classes, he’d say that there was something about Defense Against the Dark Arts that appealed to him. Maybe it was the action of it, the adventure, of using magic in battle and duels as Tom had always used it against the likes of Dennis at the orphanage. He could so easily picture himself, glowing wand in hand, striking out against a sea of opponents.

Tom still read through all the books with equal energy and attention, making sure to memorize and note everything the way he always did so that he could better catch up to Lizzie. And here, he realized with some shock, he’d always had an edge over Lizzie in the practical application of magic (she’d known everything, sure, but as far as he knew she’d never used it), and for once he might be the best rather than simply second best.

It was such a strange thought, almost liberating, for all that he hadn’t chafed at being second best to his sister (it had always been that way and, being his twin, in many ways Lizzie was just an extension of himself so it wasn’t as if he was really losing) it seemed so odd that for once he might be ahead of her. He could look over to her and guide her way like she had him through so many different subjects, show her how to use her gifts like he did and fight back against the faceless, muggle, mob…

Point being though, as far as the fervent studying from January until August was concerned, Tom didn’t have a favorite. Lizzie though, she read all the books certainly, read them more than once, but she had an almost unnatural focus on Transfiguration.

The first time she’d finished it, sitting curled on her bed, she’d looked almost in awe, then almost terrified, as if she’d just seen the burning bush and realized it was the face of God. Then she’d looked at him and she’d said, “Tom, if this is real… The kind of energy it’d take to do something like this, to do it stably without disastrous consequences… How? How is it possible?”

She hadn’t appreciated his almost annoyed answer, given while he was laying in his own bed, staring at the Potions text book and kicking his legs back and forth idly, of, “Magic, Lizzie, obviously.”

Sometimes, he couldn’t help but think, Lizzie really did get entirely too lost in that head of hers. Right now, for instance, Tom was more than done with Transfiguration for the moment and instead focused on their immediate future, maybe the most important decision of their lives, the Hogwarts houses that he’d read about.

“Lizzie, I said, why would we want to go anywhere but Slytherin?” Tom repeated, with more insistence this time, waiting for Lizzie to actually put down the damn book and talk to him already.

Finally, with a sigh, Lizzie set down the well-worn book and turned her attention to him. She leaned forward, that sober, serious, familiar adult look showing up on her face again as she studied him. Then a wry smile as she admitted, “Well, to be honest, the idea of sorting children on such… broad stereotypical features rubs me the wrong way. A human being is more than his ambition, his bravery, his tenacity, and his wits, but instead should be the sum of these and more.”

Tom laughed, it was such a Lizzie answer to give to this sort of thing, “None isn’t an option, Lizzie, and neither is all of them. So, given that, why not Slytherin?”

Here a grimace appeared on her face, as they really got into the crux of the argument of Lizzie’s typical bullheaded disapproval, “Well, ambition and cunning aren’t… bad things, I suppose. But… What kind of a person aspires to be those above all else? And to what end, where would that ambition take you? I can’t say I personally have any grandiose ambitions.”

Tom frowned then, felt that edge of annoyance grating on him when Lizzie, again, just didn’t get it. She always was just not getting it, well, not always, but often enough that he wondered if she really knew what she was saying. He supposed he appreciated their differences, that they thought differently from one another and complimented each other, but all the same he just wished…

Finally, he said, stiffly and rather darkly, “I do. And I want… I want everything, I want this world and everything in it. I want power, I want money, I want choices, Lizzie! Don’t you want that?”

Didn’t they deserve it just as much if not more than anyone else did?

She smiled, laughed, but it was a delighted young thing that made her look and act Tom’s age versus Mrs. Cole’s, so he smiled back, “Well, when you put it like that, then by George I think I do want to be in Slytherin.”

“Of course, you do,” Tom said with a nod, crossing his arms as he huffed, “It’s clearly the best house.”

Its mascot was even a snake, and if that wasn’t a sign, if that wasn’t some kind of an omen then Tom was as dull and stupid as Dennis.

“Still,” Lizzie mused, and odd smile on her face as she stared out the window at the scenery, so different than the gray streets of London, “There’s more to life than merely ambition and power, Tom.”

Tom said nothing, just looked out the window, staring at his own mulish reflection. He’d had this conversation enough times with Lizzie to know it was just something they’d never truly agree on, something she just couldn’t see. That in the end, the orphanage, good, evil, even this Hogwarts place, everything was about power.

Life was power and who had it, nothing more, and nothing less.

The rest of the train ride passed in an easy silence, Lizzie returning to her books and Tom staring out the window, waiting for Hogwarts to appear in the distance. Hogwarts, it was supposed to be wonderful, all of the books had described a great castle that had stood unnoticed by the common man, by muggles, for centuries.

It would be far more of a real home than the orphanage.

More, perhaps, Tom wondered if they could find their father. If their father was in the magical world, that perhaps he somehow hadn’t known about Lizzie or Tom in the orphanage, that their mother had simply never told him and…

Tom flushed, bitterly looking away from his reflection, reminded that he’d never come across the name Riddle in the book for History of Magic. Malfoy, Black, Potter, and so many others but never Riddle.

Eventually they put on their Hogwarts uniforms, far more worn than the ones that had been on display in the shop window, and then they were exiting with their trunks and towards the small mob of first years called over by the ground keeper. Tom glanced at their peers, all around the same height as him and Lizzie, and he couldn’t help but notice how their clothes were so much finer, their trunks scuffed and worn and clearly secondhand…

Looking at him and Lizzie, they would glance for a moment, and then some would even sneer as if they could tell just by staring that Tom and Lizzie didn’t fit some expectation, some mold, and he had no idea what it was.

Just as they had sneered down at the pair of them in Diagon Alley…

In the end Tom and Lizzie ended up in a boat with two chattering redheads, a pair who prattled on about anything and everything and the sort of test they thought might wait for them inside the castle. They grinned across as Lizzie introduced them, “I’m Lizzie Riddle, and this is my brother Tom.”

“Riddle?” one asked, “Are you muggleborn then, or are you from America you’ve got…”

“No, no I just have an accent because… I have an accent,” Elizabeth said with a small laugh, “Tom and I are muggleborn.”

Suddenly, judging by the looks on their faces, Tom knew that one did not want to be muggleborn, that Tom didn’t want him or Lizzie to be muggleborn. A glance at Lizzie’s face and she had that resigned look again, like she knew the same thing as Tom, but wasn’t going to insist that their father could have been magical or anything but instead just accept that this was the way things were.

Like she accepted everything that had ever happened to them! Accepted their fate and place in the world as if there was nothing either of them could do about it.

Well, Tom wouldn’t, didn’t, he never had! He turned his attention past the chattering idiots in their boat and towards the castle, tall and glowing across the lake, and he vowed that he’d take it for himself and his sister. No matter how she protested or sighed, he’d get into Slytherin, and he’d take this whole country for the pair of them!

Except, when the hat fell first onto Lizzie’s head, it sat for a long time and at the end gave a great cry of “RAVENCLAW!”

And Tom, staring after her, her looking back at him and smiling as she walked out of his reach, couldn’t help but wonder if he could so easily walk the path he needed to without her by his side…

The world, suddenly, seemed terribly large in a way it hadn’t only a few days ago. Like something had just shifted unexpectedly between the pair of them. Something Tom could never have prepared himself for.

Some part of him had thought it was inevitable that she would follow him to Slytherin, that she had to, if only because they were twins. That perhaps, this even meant that he had to go to Ravenclaw…

Still, the hat only hesitated for a moment, only whispered of greatness and glory, and then it was shouting “SLYTHERIN!”


	5. Chapter 5

At first, I think, Tom and I were equally unpopular.

No, at first Tom had it worse than I did. I didn’t quite realize it at the time, though I had a nagging suspicion, but you didn’t go into Slytherin if you were penniless. More, you didn’t go into Slytherin if you weren’t from the wizarding world’s aristocracy.

Tom and I, to these people, were the equivalent of trailer trash and Tom showing up in Slytherin was the equivalent of someone from Appalechia stepping onto the doorstep of Eton.

It just was not done.

I fared better if only because I had picked the reclusive but hardly as rich house of Ravenclaw.

However, Tom was nothing if not determined, and in the first weeks alone the sneers and harassment stopped, like it had all never happened in the first place. More, by the second month in October, it was like they had all forgotten just who Tom was and where he had come from. Even in the orphanage it hadn’t quite been like that, it had taken some of them years to fear Tom, and even then, even when they feared him, they would still put on this bravado to show that they didn’t.

Dennis, for example, had never learned to keep his mouth shut.

This wasn’t like that though, either stage. First the fear and ignoring, and then the pandering to him, the strange strained camaraderie where Abraxas Malfoy would show up to our table in the library and tell me that he was inviting Tom to go see the quidditch game. Never an invitation for Lizzie Riddle, not until Tom would give Abraxas a pointed and reprimanding look that of course his beloved sister was invited. It was like Tom became a part of this gang, no, not just a part, but the unquestioned leader of all of them for seemingly no reason at all.

That probably was the first sign, of Tom’s ambitions as well as his potential, that he could win over these people so set against him within a month. However, I wasn’t there first hand to see it, I was in Ravenclaw and so I could only watch in wonder and ask how he’d done it.

And he’d just smile and raise a finger to his lips in the library, wink at me, and say, “A magician never reveals his secrets, Lizzie.”

I still can’t quite figure it out if I’m honest except that…

Tom has charisma. It wasn’t all that noticeable in the orphanage, if only because he had no real need for it, we weren’t going anywhere and were stuck with each other forever. However, in Hogwarts, his charisma became everything. Sometimes, if you looked at him, you could almost swear he was glowing, especially when he smiled. He drew the eye and forced it to linger, so that I imagine even if you hated him you couldn’t help but watch.

But I wasn’t like that. For all that we’re related I have never been like that and more, I have never gotten along with my peers. Hogwarts, for me, was just… a larger and wealthier orphanage. I suddenly had adequate meals, interesting enough reading material in the library and this strange new world but I…

I could never connect to people my own age, I felt like I was talking down to them so often, and I hated that. I didn’t want to be that person and I railed against it, except railing against it turned out to mean introversion and a type of overwhelming loneliness where the gap between Tom and myself both seemed wider and non-existent as others drifted away. Within the month, I think, I gave up on any chance of a real human relationship outside of my brother, at least, not until I was an adult and out of this place.

So, where Tom flourished, in the beginning I felt as if I was stagnating and waiting for the future to unfold so that I could run and chase it already. I had no idea where I was going and what I might do only that I suddenly wanted to be there, out in the real world, wizarding or muggle and…

And I suppose it doesn’t really matter anyway, after all, I never got the chance. My future and Tom’s, I didn’t know it then, but they were mutually exclusive. We couldn’t both get what we wanted.

* * *

Tom only had two classes with Lizzie during a given week. Charms and Transfiguration, just those two, that was it, and the rest was spent with either the Gryffindors or the Hufflepuffs.

That wall he’d sensed at the sorting wasn’t just a wall, no, it was something far more impenetrable and dramatic than that. Suddenly she was just… gone. Not entirely, not truly, but he didn’t share a room with her, didn’t share every waking moment, and so often during his day in classes she wouldn’t be there at all.

At breakfast she sat a few tables away, flipping through books beneath the banner of the large crow while Tom sat in the midst of his rather nervous houesmates, ignoring the way they constantly looked at him. Well, the way they looked at him during that first week.

Oh, they’d learned very quickly what the orphans had learned, that you don’t fuck with Tom Riddle. That Tom Marvolo Riddle was made of something harder, colder, and better than them and there was nothing they could do but submit to it.

These people had been born into money, into wealth, and into privlege so when it came down to it though they had talked very tough that first night the first one had started sobbing in the first ten minutes. Sobbing and shaking in terror as Tom had wandlessly done what they could only dream of, as he whispered in his ear that he knew they thought they were funny, that it was all a lark, but they had fucked up more than they could possibly imagine.

So, a week in, and they were already sparing him wary almost awed glances, and not one of them whispering to Slughorn that their dormmate the mudblood had beat the ever-loving shit out of the lot of them.

And for once, it had been so easy. Lizzie hadn’t been standing there over his shoulder, looking at him with those sad disapproving eyes, there hadn’t been any justification for hours on hours afterwards and that willful stubbornness of hers. There hadn’t been anything at all, and when he’d seen her in Charms the next morning she’d smiled at him like she’d been missing him and it had been…

So easy, and that made him feel… He didn’t know, only that he didn’t like that separating like this made him in any way happy. Except it did, it really did.

And maybe because of that, or maybe because he did just miss her, he’d make sure to sit next to her in every class they shared together, to study with her in the library (also to get away from his dormmates who wanted him anywhere but in the Slytherin common room). He wouldn’t even say anything most of the time, just sit there and watch the way the light fell on her dark hair and wonder if she’d grown taller when he wasn’t looking or else if he’d just never noticed before.

She looked very much like him, almost like she could be an identical twin, but there were small differences he’d never noticed. Her eyes were a shade darker, her hair a bit wavier and thicker than his own as well as a shade lighter, there were small almost indistinguishable freckles dotting her pale nose…

It was still almost like looking at his face in a mirror but not quite.

And at the end of the day she’d smile, that small soft thing, say goodnight and walk away to wherever the Ravenclaw tower was hidden while Tom could only watch and wonder how she could walk away so easily.

She didn’t talk about her housemates and he didn’t talk about his, just the schoolwork, and sometimes the orphanage. And he loved that, but he hated that he loved that. He just wished… If she wasn’t so stubborn, if she wasn’t so narrow minded and philosophical, then he wouldn’t have to feel this way and she would be in Slytherin and there wouldn’t be any problem at all!

They were currently sitting in Transfiguration, listening to Dumbledore lecture again, dressed as always in an eyewatering suit that should never have seen the light of day, and as always Dumbledore was glancing over towards Lizzie that spark of fondness in his eyes. Tom’s hand tightened on his wand, his knuckles turning white as he gritted his teeth.

Dumbledore, it turned out, picked favorites and he picked them early. He’d probably already decided when he first met them in Wools, that he would hate Tom, but love Lizzie. Tom didn’t know exactly what it was he had said or did that had set Dumbledore off. No, that was a lie, he knew exactly what it was. Mrs. Cole must have told him about Dennis and Amy, about Billy Stubbs’ rabbit, about all the things that she always knew Tom had done but could never prove.

All the same though, for whatever reason, even though Mrs. Cole had always blamed Lizzie just as much, Dumbledore adored her.

Maybe it was because, in Transfiguration at least, Tom had to admit Lizzie was slightly better. She’d read the book enough times, had the thing memorized before they showed up, and while Tom was still second best by miles Lizzie had still turned a matchstick into a needle faster than he had on that first day of class.

That had… It had hurt. Sure, Tom had gotten it a few minutes later, and still did it before anyone else who were still struggling the next week even with the same exercise. Except Tom had been so ready, after Defense and Potions, to be just a little better than she was at something, anything.

And she didn’t even seem to notice, just kept watching Dumbledore’s lecture the way she’d watch any other professor lecture, and Tom hated it.

“Now, who here can tell me, from our last quiz, what the only thing in the world is that can turn lead into gold? Anyone?”

Tom’s hand rose into the sky, Dumbledore glanced over it, searching the room until he landed on some mousey Ravenclaw, “Ah, yes, Mary.”

“The philosopher’s stone, sir,” she said, a note of pride in her voice, as if the ability to read was something she should be proud of.

“Excellent, one point to Ravenclaw, and who made it?” another search of the room, another ignoring of Tom’s hand, this time landing on Abraxas Malfoy, “Yes, Abraxas.”

“Nicholas Flamel, sir,” the boy preened, gave Tom a particularly smug look, as if it was a slight on Tom’s intelligence or blood that he hadn’t been chosen by Dumbledore for reading comprehension.

“Good work, a point to Slytherin, we’re neck and neck today,” Dumbledore said with a cheerful smile, clapping his hands and rubbing them together, like they were all just pals.

“Now, turning led into gold, that sounds a lot like Transfiguration, doesn’t it? And yet, Nicholas Flamel is an alchemist. So, can anyone tell me, take a guess, at why he’s one and not the other?” this was always a tactic of Dumbledore, warm up with the easy questions, the basic ones to build confidence, and then ask something a little harder and see who would take the bait. It rarely had anything to do with the lesson itself, undoubtedly they’d be moving back on to matchsticks and needles soon enough, but he always started out this way.

And always, every single time, it’d fall to Lizzie.

“Anyone?”

Tom raised his hand, more out of spite than a true answer, although if Dumbledore wanted a stab in the dark then goddamn it all Tom could bloody give it to him as well as anyone else. As well as Lizzie, even.

No one else raised their hand, not even Lizzie who was giving Tom a side-eyed look as he just raised his hand higher. Finally when the silence went on too long, Lizzie hesitantly, slowly, lifted her hand and gave into the pressure. The only other hand in the air beside Tom’s.

“Yes, Elizabeth,” Dumbledore said, and you could tell he had just been waiting for her to give in already.

“Honestly, I think it’s semantics,” Lizzie said, “Alchemy falls under the general umbrella of transfiguration but with some of the practical aspects of potions. At its heart though, it’s the process of changing one substance into another, an element into another, and I can’t think of anything that’s more transfiguration than that even if you don’t use a wand quite as much.”

“Very good answer,” Dumbledore said, “And she is very correct, alchemy, despite the potions, despite the runes and the arithmancy, is in fact transfiguration. A very advanced, very niche, field of transfiguration but transfiguration none the less. Now, you’re probably wondering why I’m bringing this up. Well, first, alchemy is a specialty of mine and I love to talk about it, but second, it shows that transfiguration is in nearly every higher branch of magic. Transfiguration is important in ways you’d never even dream of, and something as daunting or simple as turning a matchstick into a needle opens up whole realms of possibilities. Transfiguration, quite literally, can change your very world. Now, that said, one more time we’re going to continue that first practical exercise and then next week move onto broader horizions…”

Dumbledore continued talking, drawing on the board and splitting up the class to go help their peers. Tom would be working with Crabbe and Goyle and the others who after two days still hadn’t gotten it while Lizzie would tend to the dimmer Ravenclaws (and what a fate, he thought with a sneer, to be a stupid Ravenclaw).

And all Tom could think was that even though it was easier in some ways, even though it was sometimes refreshing, he didn’t like that Dumbledore was cutting into his time with his sister. He didn’t have much of it to spare these days, interhouse relationships were turning out to be anything but easy, and Dumbledore was knowingly cutting into that.

He probably thought she didn’t mind but Tom could tell that she was bored out of her bloody mind. She had that slightly glazed look, helpful enough, but that internal sigh as she looked down at a blubbering Ravenclaw girl who just wasn’t getting it and probably never would.

Tom for his own part felt much the same way as he looked down at fat bulky Crabbe, still trying and failing, who was now hissing at Tom, “Don’t need your help, Riddle.”

Tom did not wish to give him his bloody help and had he been at Wools wouldn’t have except…

Except he wasn’t at Wools.

He’d realized that in these past few weeks that everything had changed. In Wools there had been no point putting on a show because it would have changed nothing. Tom and Lizzie would always be poor unwanted orphans there. Here though, here there was money everywhere, a way out and if Tom could connect to these people…

So, he just thinly smiled, a polite thing that would impress Dumbledore (except that it didn’t) and had Crabbe go slightly pale as he remembered the last time Tom had smiled like that and he had ended up in the hospital wing. Politely, he said, “Well then, Crabbe, just let me know when you do.”

And it was nice, he thought, that Lizzie was too wrapped up in her own world for once to notice. That perhaps, perhaps it was good that they kept their distance for now, because it gave Tom the opportunity he needed inside of this school. As if it was only now, outside of the shadow of his sister and her all-seeing eyes, that he could stretch his wings and reach all that he had the potential to be.

He’d leave Lizzie to that world inside of her head, filled with infinite worlds and their possibilties and thousands upon thousands of stories, while Tom would take reality by storm.

**Author's Note:**

> Written after seeing a few too many SI fics and deciding to do my own version of them. That said, I'll warn you now that this fic gets dark fairly quickly, and while I might not call the violence exceedingly graphic it does get intense. So, if that's not your cup of tea, I suggest you leave now.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, bookmarks, etc. are much appreciated.


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